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Cher, Mark Ruffalo Join Forces for Climate Change Documentary

In This Climate, a new documentary about the perils of climate change, was originally supposed to be a six-minute short. But as directors Pablo Ganguli and Tomas Auksas did more research, they realized they had to go much, much deeper. “It's really the biggest crisis of our time,” Ganguli tells Vanity Fair in an interview.

The film will be released via Liberatum, a global multi-disciplinary cultural organization founded by Ganguli in 2001 (Auksas serves as Liberatum's creative director). In a new trailer, shared above, famous faces like Cher, Marina Abramovic, Mark Ruffalo, and Vivienne Westwood speak passionately about the world's climate crisis, alongside citizens whose lives have already been dangerously affected by rising sea levels.

“Where's your brain?” Cher asks of climate change deniers in the trailer. “How can our brains be so different? How can you not notice all the things that are changing?”

Ganguli was determined to include celebrities in the film, in order “to engage young people who are very much into the arts.”

“If you only involve government people and scientists, you’re not reaching the masses the way you should,” he says. The documentary also features Noam Chomsky and David Attenborough, among others.

Actor Mark Ruffalo.

Courtesy of Tomas Auksas.

The trailer includes old footage of current president-elect Donald Trump saying he doesn't believe in climate change, an opinion he's voiced repeatedly over the years (he previously called global warming a hoax created by China). The fact that a world leader holds such beliefs is a “big worry,” Ganguli says. “Most people, like it or not, do care about these issues . . . then you have someone like Trump who comes in and de-values the intelligence of the ordinary man on the street.”

“I would hope that the people who advise him once he goes to White House, the people who are going to be working closely with him, will inject some basic intelligence into his mind as far as the environment is concerned,” he adds.

In This Climate will be screened at festivals and events around the world in early 2017.